Thanks to my colleague S~ for bringing me this sweet book.
Cinnamon Baby by Nicola Winstanley. Illustrated by Janice Nadeau Miriam is a baker. She sings and bakes every morning in her bakery, all different kinds of delicious bread, always finishing with her favorite cinnamon bread. One day, Sebastian rides by on his bicycle. Lured in by the smell and Miriam’s sweet voice, he buys bread from her every day for a year. Then, they marry and have a baby. Though it’s not noted in the text, Sebastian is dark-skinned and Miriam pale; their baby comes out the color of cinnamon. After a few blissful days, though, the baby starts crying. Nothing either Miriam or Sebastian can do soothes it. Finally, Miriam wakes the exhausted Sebastian early in the morning to bring the baby with her to the bakery. When the sweet smell of cinnamon and the sound of its mother’s voice fill the air, the baby is finally soothed.
The story is sweet and simple on its own, but has many touches that add to its charm. I loved that the interracial marriage wasn’t a big enough deal to mention in the text. I loved that Sebastian – again, just in the pictures – cycled around playing his violin. Bonus points, too, for both parents making music. Taking a full year to fall in love and decide to get married is a welcome antidote to the one kiss insta-romance of fairy tales. The thin and swirly watercolor lines of this help make this a book to be savored.
Originally posted at http://library-mama.dreamwidth.org .
Steampunk-style Jewelry by Jean Campbell Steampunk, for this purpose, is loosely defined as fantasy Victorian with an emphasis on the beauty of early mechanical pieces. The jewelry is projects intended for the reader to be able to reproduce and use as inspiration. There are necklaces, earrings and bracelets. They use bead or craft store bits and wire, often combined with gears and other parts from cannibalized antique watches or reproduced old photographs. There is a lengthy introduction on the techniques used. When hazardous materials are used, cautions are given both in the intro and in the individual projects. The instructions seem thorough, including lists of materials and which steps might need practicing on scrap materials first, which, as a novice would-be jewelry-maker, I appreciate. 
Campfire Cookery by Sarah Huck and Jaime Young I have been a camper for as long as I can remember. But up until now, our camp cooking has consisted of one of three styles: something close to our regular fare cooked over a propane or butane burner, food of the type that can be stuck on a stick and held over the fire, or food that can be wrapped in foil and stuck in the coals. I thought that as we were using heat to do cook mostly fresh food, we were doing quite well. This book, however, strives to juxtapose the beauty of and simplicity of nature with the very best in cookery. Huck and Young advocate real cooking over or in your campfire, or, if you must, your backyard fire or grill. Their advice is a mix of practical and silly, told in an archly formal tone so funny that it made the book a delight to read whether or not I had any intentions of trying their recipes. Their packing list started off with essentials, all of which I agreed with (cast iron cookware, steel mixing bowls, three knives) and proceeded on to optional items – a parasol, swathes of lace for keeping flies off food, smelling salts. They include instructions on how to construct a safe fire area in the wilderness, how to build your fire without matches or fire starters, how to gauge the heat of your flame for cooking purposes, and how to return your fire spot to nature when you are done. The recipes seem mostly French inspired, with some English tea-time thrown in for good measure. They start off with recipes to make at home, including potted spreads, ketchup, and the homemade graham crackers and marshmallows shown on the cover. They move on to all the major meals, tea time, breads and dessert, with suggested beverages (alcoholic and non, but mostly alcoholic) for all of these. Many of the recipes include items they suggest you forage for, or perhaps purchase at a farmer’s market on the way in. They look delicious, though what’s sticking in my mind right now are the roasted figs with honey, and fresh biscuits baked in the fire. 
The Reading Promise by Alice Ozma This memoir comes from a young woman who made a promise with her father at about age 9: they would read together every night. At first, they planned to read for 100 nights, but as they reached that goal, they aimed for 1000 and then kept right on going. They read through Alice Ozma’s mother leaving, through her late high school drama evenings and her father’s larangytis, right through until she left for college. Alice Ozma (named, of course, for her father’s favorite storybook heroines) narrates the story. I’d heard a lot about this book, and was slightly disappointed that it spent more time talking about what was going on around the reading than discussing the books they read. There are quotes from the books heading the chapters, and a bibliography at the end, but this is more memoir than reading reflection. It’s enjoyable as a memoir, but I want you, Dear Reader, to be more prepared than I was for the actual content of this book. Ozma paints a glowing portrait of her father, so dedicated to reading to children that he would hide her in a sleeping bag under his desk at work if she claimed to be sick, so that he could still read to his classes at the school library where he worked. More heartbreaking was his early retirement, when his school board decided that library time should be mostly about learning to use computers, with not more than five to ten minutes spent being read to. I wish for every child to have as dedicated a read-toer as Ozma’s father. 
Five Little Peppers and How They Grew by Margaret Sidney. Read by Bernadette Dunne This book, published in 1881, is a Victorian Sweet Family Struggles through Hard Times novel. (Little Women, featuring a family with older children, was published in 1868.) The Peppers are a family of six. Mrs. Pepper, or Mamsie, is a widow struggling to support her five children with her needlework. As hard as she works, it’s only ever enough to put bread in their mouths, never enough to send them to school. Ben, the oldest at twelve, also works outside the home to bring in some extra cash, while Polly, probably eleven, manages the house, doing the cooking, cleaning, and taking care of the three younger children, Davie, Joel and little Phronsie, the baby at three years old. Despite their poverty, the little brown house in which they live is filled with love and laughter. They have little adventures around things like trying to bake a birthday cake for Mamsie, though they can’t afford white flour, getting measles, and trying to celebrate Christmas with gifts. One or the other of the girls getting lost is a recurring theme, resolved by the little girl being found by a rich man of some variety. In the first incident, little Phronsie is kidnapped by an itinerant organ grinder, left behind in the country, and rescued by thirteen-year-old Jasper King and his dog Prince. This develops into a family friendship that leads to first Polly and then the whole Pepper family moving into the King family mansion. I counted this plot device happening three times over the course of the book, and it’s not really a life message I want my children to absorb – just get lost and find a rich stranger who will rescue you and improve your lot in life. I also found the relentless sentimentality of the writing style to be a bit much. Never a child is mentioned to be doing something but the hand doing it is described as being a chubby little hand, even when the owner of the hand is eleven or twelve. I found that the narrator’s style exaggerated this with her reading style, so that it might not be so cloying if someone else were reading it. However, I was still able to enjoy it, even as the plot got increasingly improbable. When LB gets old enough not to want to hold hands in public, he might not enjoy this series so much. For right now, I’ll enjoy both holding hands and his excitement at finding out that we can get sequels from 
Homemade Soda by Andrew Schloss Once upon a time, my love and I made a batch of ginger ale from scratch for a party, following a 
The Dragon of Cripple Creek by Troy HowellWhy shouldn’t there be dragons in the Wild West? After all, the west had gold and mountains, both good dragon factors. That’s the premise this book is built on. It’s set, though, in the present time. Katlin, aka Kalamity Kat, is crazy about gold. Her family is driving cross country for a new job for her father, leaving her mother behind, comatose in a nursing home. They might be broke, but that doesn’t stop Kat from begging until they stop for a tour at the Mollie Kathleen mine for a tour. There, she falls behind, gets lost, and discovers Ye, an ancient and ailing dragon hiding in the bottom of the mine with his considerable hoard. He’s friendly and eloquent and mostly convinces her to leave the gold behind, as deceased dragons turn into gold. This scene, where he tells her what he needs to regain his health, made my son cry when I told it to him as a bedtime story. Naturally, though, the one little lump of gold that she couldn’t quite part with falls out in front of media cameras when she finds her way out. This leads to a storm threatening to become another gold rush, with lots of pressure on Katlin to reveal the location of the gold in the supposedly played-out mine. In order to protect Ye, Katlin will have to confess the truth to her big brother and gain his support for her plan. There’s a lot of fast action, sadly only a couple of scenes with the dragon, and a whole lot of thinking about ethics. That makes this both fun and surprisingly deep for a book with a premise as light-hearted as dragons in the Wild West.
Smile by Raina Telgemeier. Smile is the true story of a girl navigating middle and high school with the dreaded braces. Already somewhat insecure, Raina is horrified when two of her front teeth get knocked out. The solution is oral surgery, braces, and even headgear at night. How can she even have a chance at looking cool? Along the way, she deals with band, an earthquake, starts to get interested in boys, and navigates the decidedly treacherous waters of friendship. Though it’s solidly set in San Francisco in the early 1990s, anyone who’s experienced middle or high school will find common ground with Raina. Here, the graphic novel format really helped the setting stay in the background while the characters stood out. This is a disarmingly honest story of a journey from insecurity to self-discovery, with braces. It is well deserving of its recent Eisner award. 
The Uncertain Places by Lisa Goldstein This book comes with great recommendations – blurbs by de Lint, Beagle, Le Guin, and more. It’s the 1970s in Berkley, a great time to be in college. Our narrator Will’s best friend Ben brings Will to his girlfriend’s house with him. The Feierabend family – Maddie and her sisters Livvy and Rose – live with their mother, Sylvia, in a crazy house with large and stylistically incompatible sections added on to each other. Will and Livvy fall in love, and only after things are serious between them does Will realize that the strange things that happen in and around the house are real and dangerous. A long-ago Feierabend made a bargain with the Fae – eternal prosperity for the family in exchange for seven years of the life of a daughter in each generation. The Faerie here are definitely the ambiguous, untrustworthy kind, neither all good nor all bad. When Livvy falls asleep and can’t be woken up, Will is the only one willing to do whatever it takes to get her back, even if it means confronting the Queen of Faerie. That could be the end of a satisfying story right there, but, like Into the Woods, it goes on from there. Does Livvy’s family really want to end the curse? How does one partner rescuing another change the dynamic of their relationship? How much are people willing to do for Luck, and is it worth having? I found myself looking for my parents in Will and Livvy, a young couple in college in close to the same era, which was an extra level of interest for me. But there is plenty to recommend the book without that hook, with familiar plot elements twisted together into something new, unexpected, both beautiful and frightening. 
Odd and the Frost Giants by Neil Gaiman. Read by the author. Let us now praise Neil Gaiman, for not only can he write well for adults and for children, for the page and for the screen, but he is also an excellent book narrator. In this short tale, only two discs long, we meet our hero, young Odd. He’s a young Viking lad, lame in one leg, with a dead father, a Scottish mother, and an overbearing, somewhat abusive stepfather. When, one year, winter doesn’t end and tempers in his little house begin to fray, he runs away to the woods. There he meets a sly fox, a slow but friendly bear, and a somewhat fierce eagle. During the night with them in his father’s old woodcutting hut, he hears them talk and learns that they are gods, trapped in animal form and exiled by the Frost Giants to Midgard. Odd decides that it’s up to him to get the gods back to Asgard and the Frost Giants out, which will both save the gods and stop the endless winter. The Norse mythology is solid, Odd an engaging and scrappy hero, and the interactions between the gods priceless. The print version, which I haven’t looked at, is illustrated by Brett Helquist, so there are delights to be had in either version. 
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